Over the course of the past several weeks, as they gear up for the wide release of their new meta slasher film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun has been making the rounds in the press. With other filmmakers, this process can get kind of exhausting to keep up with, as many in the entertainment industry today are so meticulously and precisely PR-trained that they wind up just kind of rehashing the same handful of talking points over and over again. But Schoenbrun has been nothing short of delightful in the lead up to the new film, as they have taken the opportunity time and again to hold fascinating and in-depth conversations about the genre and Camp Miasma’s place within it.
This reached a delightful new peak recently when the writer-director sat down with GQ to discuss a number of slashers that influenced Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and spoke at length about a number of under-appreciated gems that had large influences on their craft and the film as a whole.
After making two phenomenal films across the past several years, in the form of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun began gearing up to tackle their biggest and most ambitious project to-date: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The film tells the meta story of an in-narrative filmmaker being brought onto a long-running slasher series to make a new installment and beginning a collaborative process with the in-narrative actress who played the ‘final girl’ in the original iteration of this fictional franchise. That entire premise immediately sounds loaded with potential, especially in the hands of a filmmaker as existentially and esoterically minded as Schoenbrun, and the film looks to blend these more insightful instincts with traditional slasher fare. But as Schoenbrun detailed in the interview, it is very much not a film that looks down on traditional slashers; rather, it celebrates them.
The six films that Schoenbrun cites as slashers that had a profound influence on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma are Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), Richard Franklin’s Psycho II (1983), Chuck Russell’s Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987), Steve Miner’s Friday the 13th: Part 2 (1981), and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960).
This is an absolute murderer’s row of some of the greatest horror films from across the past several decades (with the notable exception of Van Sant’s Psycho, which Schoenbrun explains they find fascinating as a “filmic exercise”). Some of these are fan favorites, such as Dream Warriors, Evil Dead II, and Friday the 13th: Part 2, all of which are often considered high-water marks within their respective franchises by fans and critics alike. Others are underseen and underappreciated gems, such as Psycho II and Peeping Tom, each of which is drenched in thematic intent, meta techniques, and utter compulsion.
Ultimately, this bodes exceedingly well for Schoenbrun’s horror tastes (as if fans weren’t already aware of that) and only makes me all the more excited to check out Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma as soon as humanly possible.
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